("Hello viewers!")

Did you have a nice Christmas? Lots of expensive new games?

Here's a story. 

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A couple of weeks ago, the games business held its annual awards ceremony at the ultra-posh Savoy Hotel in London. The "InDin" (as it's known) is a lavish black-tie event with tickets priced at hundreds of pounds.

The event is billed, you see, as a charity fund-raising evening, with money raised going to UK sick children's charities.

This year, the InDin raised a little over one million pounds for these charities. Stick with for me a minute.

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The InDin, of course, isn't the only reason that this is the big time of year for the games business. More games are sold in December than pretty much the rest of the year put together.

Last week, the top-selling five games in the UK alone brought in revenue of just under £9 million. Remember, that's just five games we're talking about. And that's the money they took in in just one single week.

I hope you're noting these facts down. There'll be questions in just a moment.

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The last fact to note is that at the moment, the games industry's trade organisation ELSPA is mounting a big campaign against piracy.

ELSPA is hoping to raise a total of £200,000 from its members to fund this campaign. ELSPA's members (over 100 of them) are pretty much every company involved in the European games biz. (Including the ones who made 9 million quid last week from five games alone.)

You might think, then, that £200,000 wouldn't be much of a problem for them.

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After all, the sum ELSPA are trying to raise to fight piracy comes to less than £2,000 per company. When you discover that Electronic Arts, for example, took well over £2 million just from FIFA 99 last week, you'd be forgiven for thinking that they could stump up their £2,000 easily enough.

Bearing all these facts in mind, then, you might be surprised when I tell you where the £100,000 donation ELSPA received last week for the anti-piracy campaign came from. Because it was stolen from the InDin Charity Fund.

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Of course, I'm using the word "stolen" slightly incorrectly here. The donation was made, quite publicly, by the organisers of the InDin.

(Who are, of course, nearly all also members of ELSPA.)

Confused? I'll make it simpler. The games business raised a lot of money by claiming it was for sick children's charities. Then it decided to give a huge chunk of the money back to itself to bump up its own profits. (The sick children, presumably, can just die.)

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Indeed, the amount the games business snatched back from the charity fund was the second-biggest chunk that went to anyone. Only ONE charity, out of 38, got more money than the games business decided to "award" back to itself.

(A major cancer charity, for example, received just a tenth of the money given to the anti-piracy campaign. Great Ormond Street Hospital got £35,000 less.) Clearly, the games business thinks of its profit figures as a more deserving charity than cancer research or hospitals.

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You might want to bear this in mind the next time a software publishers tells you that games have to cost as much as they do. You might want to bear this in mind the next time they try to make you spend £135 on three versions of the same game in a single year, or release another tired old second sequel.